The rotation of Earth shapes our climate system in various ways: It controls the major wind directions, lets the weather systems swirl, and, together with the topography, it creates strong ocean currents. Many other features of the climate system, like the monsoon systems and the meridional overturning circulation in the ocean arise from complex interactions within the climate system, and their exact dependency on the topography is hard to pinpoint. To further improve our fundamental…
Dr. Dirk Notz, from the department "The Ocean in the Earth System", talks about the world climate conference in Bonn. The interview focuses on climate change, politics and economics (in German).
Climate and Earth system models are applied to simulate the past, present, and projected future climate, and to advance understanding of processes that influence the climate. They are major pillars for the scientific work at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M). The models serve to develop and investigate new ideas that are inspired by, or may themselves inspire, new observations and theories. MPI-M's success in applying comprehensive models to questions in climate science is…
Complex Earth system models, such as the model of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-ESM), have a reduced resolution for climate applications. Increasing the resolution in a coupled model results in improved atmospheric and oceanic dynamics and reduces biases in mean states and variability of many meteorological and oceanographic quantities. It improves, for example, atmospheric blockings and storm tracks. On the other hand, increase of resolution often comes with unexpected problems…
There are natural processes in the Earth system that remove anthropogenic carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping to limit climate change. These processes in natural biogeochemical cycles and feedbacks may change in a warmer climate, thereby amplifying climate change. How the carbon cycle and feedbacks will change is very uncertain.
Dr. Dirk Notz, from the department „The Ocean in the Earth System“, talks about the ice in the Antarctic and how it will disappear. First, he explains how the study takes place, afterwards he illustrates the impact of humans on this process and when the ice is gone.
It has been a long-standing question whether climate change can be traced back to human activities. In order to answer it more precisely and to identify possible future developments more reliably, it is necessary to understand the underlying physical processes in even greater detail.
Which climate effects do clouds have? Under what conditions do they warm or cool the atmosphere? And what role do clouds play in shaping the atmospheric circulation, and hence help maintain the environment in which they grow?
The new study "Rethinking the lower bound on aerosol forcing" in the Journal of Climate, written by Prof. Bjorn Stevens, director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) and head of the department "The Atmosphere in the Earth System", presents a number of arguments as to why the cooling effect of aerosols is neither as strong nor as uncertain as has previously been thought.
Observations suggest a hiatus in global surface temperature since 1998, whereas most climate models simulate continued warming. What causes this difference? Do climate models respond too sensitively to the increase in greenhouse-gas concentrations such as that of CO2, and thus overestimate climate change systematically? Or has the discrepancy arisen by chance? A study just published by the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) gives a clear answer: There is no evidence for systematic…
In a new study, published in Nature Geoscience, Prof. Dr. Martin Claussen, director of the department "The Land in the Earth System" at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M), and researchers of his team analysed to what extent plant diversity influences the stability of climate-vegetation interaction.
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